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Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by RiderOfGiraffes on Friday February 12, 2010 @06:23PM (#1122113)
Firstly, I most highly commend you for your existing use of English. It's not an easy language to learn, and the item you've pointed to is really rather good - I only spotted a few small errors that matter, and I'm very picky. It's certainly much, much better than I ever got at French, German, Danish, Swedish, Bulgarian or Spanish. Overall, they didn't really detract from the item.

For many people it won't matter much, but for a few it definitely will. You need to decide how much it matters to you, and if you decide it matters, you need a copy-editor. You don't want someone to write the copy, you just want someone to tidy it up and remove the worst of the errors without changing the content much.

What contacts do you have? My circle of contacts would, for me, each copy-edit a few hundred words a fortnight. Depending how much I wrote, that would probably be enough without imposing on them too much. I'd also then buy them a beer, or cook them a meal every couple of weeks to say thank you.

There are also tools such as the Link Grammar. After spell checking, type what you want into that and see if you get one parse. If so, you're done. It's easy to download and install, and not so hard to automate.

That would be my recommendation.

PS: I'm a complete grammar-nazi and am probably much more severe than most people. Trust me - it was pretty good.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by marilyn on Friday February 12, 2010 @06:39PM (#1122155)
I agree completely with this. While it is admirable that you have come this far with your English, poor English will interfere with your message for a lot of people. There is no shame in hiring a copy editor, best selling novelists rely heavily on their editors.

I would also advise that you read more. Pick up a novel that you find interesting. The more you expose yourself to well written English, the better your English will become.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by jimmyjim on Friday February 12, 2010 @09:09PM (#1122386)
>I only spotted a few small errors that matter

Just out of curiosity, can you point out these errors?

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by aquadoctorbob on Saturday February 13, 2010 @01:24AM (#1122647)
I'm a native speaker of American English. It was certainly readable, but some of the sentence constructions were stilted enough to distract me. Here's my extremely pedantic edit, which also changes the tone to be more conversational:

http://pastebin.com/f4c49579f

HTH :)

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by jimmyjim on Saturday February 13, 2010 @02:24AM (#1122697)
Thanks!

And if anyone wishes to see the changes: paste both texts into http://www.quickdiff.com/index.php and hit 'Compare'

Okay, if any of you actually went through the exercise of pasting it onto quickdiff.com, you probably noticed how aggravating it was to copy & paste from that container. Really a bigger turn-off in terms of UI than his English skills, in my opinion.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by lewro on Saturday February 13, 2010 @06:55AM (#1122931)
Thank you for this! I am not sure if I should change the copy now as it would probably does not make sense for people who would come later to read the article and there would be no mistakes.
Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by malkia on Friday February 12, 2010 @06:48PM (#1122177)
Wondering what made you learn Bulgarian, I'm bulgarian that's why I ask :)
Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by RiderOfGiraffes on Saturday February 13, 2010 @04:27AM (#1122807)
A few years ago for my day job I was technical consultant on a demonstration being given to the Bulgarian Navy. Our equipment worked perfectly from the moment it was installed, so apart from helping our partners solve a problem with their kit, I had very little to do. I had a Bulgarian phrase book, so I decided to test out this technique:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LearningLanguages.html?HN

I went to the local shops and bought a copy in Bulgarian of "Men At Arms" by Terry Pratchett, and I set about decrypting it.

As you might expect, I didn't really get all that far in four days, but I was able to go to the local shops and order coffee, comment on the weather, reply to questions about my work, and read the menu. I could also do some actual shopping, with considerable tolerance from the vendors, no doubt, but without anything other than Bulgarian and good will.

We had a formal dinner at the end, and as the Rear Admiral came down the line shaking hands I said "Blagodarya" (can't write Cyrillic) and he stopped dead in his tracks. "You speak Bulgarian?" he asked, in tones of great surprise. "Only a few hundred words - I've only been here 3 days" was my reply. He proceeded to quiz me on common phrases, and seemed surprised and impressed.

Later, when we all got a "Thank You" email, I was the only one whose email was personalised. More, even though that contract was never awarded, we have since been contacted to start negotiations for other work. Clearly the episode made an impression.

Sadly, after leaving I didn't have the chance to continue practising and I lost it all quite quickly, but there was a magic period of a few hours where I was really getting the hang of communicating (comprehension was significantly better than synthesis), and it has made me regret again my mono-lingual background.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message? by malkia on Saturday February 13, 2010 @11:31AM (#1123149)
Thanks for sharing the story!